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Unallocated space on a different disk than C drive
I have read several forums and postings on this subject but so far I have not had any luck in getting an answer to my issue. I have an HP laptop with a 500 GB HD that came with Vista. I partioned the disk to create a data disk so that we could store pictures on it. So the computer showed a C drive (OS, 220 GB) and E drive (recovery 12 GB) and a D drive (data 232 GB). About six months ago I loaded Windows 7 on it with no problems and the computer still showed the same info. I was set up Windows backup and using the D drive as the back up location and as you can imagine as the C drive grew it started to run out of room to do the backup.
So I bought and installed a Seagate 2 TB external HD. I moved the data files (pictures mostly) from the D drive to the Seagate, which is now showing as the H drive. I opened the Back Up utility and selected the H drive as the new back up location and performed a back up. Per instructions found several places online I used the Windows command "Delete Volume" from the drop down menu under Computer Management/Storage/Disk Management to free up the old D drive space. Everything seemed to work fine and I now have 232 GB of unallocated space.
My problem is that the D drive was assigned a new disk number. So on the Disk Management view I have Disk 0 on the top row, with the C and E drive listed. On the second row I show Disk 1, no drive letter, with unallocated space (there is a third row with Disk 3, H drive). I guess that means that I have one physical internal hard drive but it reads it as two disks? I am trying to move the unallocated space into the C drive. I realize that I need to somehow move the unallocated space next to the C drive in order to get it to expand into it. As of now, the "Extend Volume" option is greyed out in both the C and the E drive options.
The whole purpose of this exercise was to simply remove the data/back up files from the D drive and move them to the new external drive and reclaim this space for my C drive, which is using 197 GB of the 220 GB that is allocated to it. I can't for the life of me figure out how to do this. I tried to use the Administrative Command prompt. The Disk 0 and Disk 1 show up in the Disk List, but under the Volume List the unallocated space does not appear, since it has no volume. Should I assign it a volume letter by using the New Simple Volume Wizard command in Computer Management? And if so, do I need to format the space? Or is it more complicated than this?
Any help appreciated. Thanks